Sugar Plum Fairy Sara Mearns Danced Through Hearing Loss and Depression For Too Long

Image Source: Erin Baino

It's 10 a.m. on a Friday and Sara Mearns is in her dressing room wearing a purple chunky-knit sweater with her hair down, tousled and tossed to one side. Her casual appearance isn't what you might expect for "The Nutcracker" principal ballerina; she looks comfortable in the space, but more importantly, in her skin. This wasn't always the case.

After gradually losing her hearing over the decade and experiencing a significant bout of depression in 2021, Mearns says she is finally in the place of "being who I want to be" as a woman and as an artist. But it's been a capital-J journey for the South Carolina native.

Mearns was just three years old when her mom put her in classes. "I was kicking and screaming going into the studio," she tells Popsugar. But somewhere along the way, she fell in love with the craft, emotion, technique, and vulnerability of dance. Mearns compares herself to many other athletes in that "once they get into the sport that they love, nothing else exists." She adds, "That's what dance was for me." From ages 12 through 15 she attended summer sessions at the School of American Ballet in New York City, fighting to standout.

"It was four summer courses and at the end of the last summer course, they had not asked me to stay for the full year. And that's usually what they do when they want the most talented students to be at the year-round school," Mearns explains. So, she pleaded her case: "I went to them and I basically asked them if I could stay, because I told the teacher if I go back to South Carolina, that's it. Like I'm going to be done . . . I'm not going to dance anymore and there's nothing back there for me professionally and this is the end of the road. I was 15 saying this to them."

Her tenacity paid off though, and the school found both a place and partial scholarship for her to attend the full year's training program. Mearns spent the next few years in the industry trying to prove herself at various ballet studios in New York and San Francisco.

"I didn't consider myself one of those dancers that had the big extension, the big jumps, the feet, the perfect body. I didn't have any of that. But I knew that I could dance circles around people in the studios," she says. "I could really move."

With that confidence, Mearns came back to the city and eventually earned a spot as an apprentice in the New York City Ballet in 2003. The following year she would join the company as a member of the corps de ballet. In 2006, at age 18, she was soloing in "Swan Lake," which she credits as changing the trajectory of her career. "It only takes that one chance to open up everything in your world. And then you just go for it," Mearns says. By 2008, she was promoted to principal dancer, the highest rank in a professional ballet company.

About six years later, another moment would unexpectedly alter her career trajectory. While in Brazil, Mearns attended a carnival rehearsal in a metal gym, listening to the hour-long beating of over 100 drums. When she left, she couldn't hear and it persisted for a few days, but when she went to see a doctor in New York, her concerns were assuaged and she was told not to worry: "It's just some hearing loss and low registers. No big deal."

When the COVID pandemic began, Mearns realized how wrong her doctor had been. "That's when it all really hit me, because I couldn't see anybody's mouths and I couldn't hear them because of the masks," she says. All of sudden she noticed how high the volume was on her TVs, that she was missing bits and pieces of conversations and punch lines, the music in the dance studios seemed incredibly low, and she started asking her partners to translate instructions and critiques being given in rehearsals.

Then when performances halted, her mental health really started to suffer. For many artists and performers, Mearns says the pandemic signaled one of two things: a much-needed break or a potential end to your career. Mearns adopted the latter mindset. "In my head, I'm losing out on some of the best years of my career in my prime, mid 30s. And I can't stop, I have to keep going. I have to do whatever jobs is available to me with all the institutions in New York," she says. Mearns turned her second bedroom into a studio, installing a barre and marley, a type of vinyl dance flooring used in many performance spaces. That intensity continued into the fall 2021 season, when performances resumed, and she continued to seek perfection.

Comparison, for Mearns, became the thief of joy as she looked around and noticed that half the dancers beside her hadn't even been born when she started with the company. She felt pressure to prove herself and it "hit like a massive brick wall," Mearns says. "I just completely had a breakdown, burnout, depression situation." The unaddressed hearing loss didn't help.

By the end of the fall 2021 season, Mearns decided to take a hiatus from dance and seek professional help.

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Now, in reflecting on where the pressure originated, Mearns says it was both self-inflicted and in the nature of the work. The pressure of being an athlete - and if you're a dancer, an artist, too - means you have to bring all your emotions to the performance. "We have to show all that," she says.

Plus, there was a piece of herself that she'd kept secret for years. "Now I realize - even though I'm one of those most expressive, musical, emotional dancers - I was shying away [on stage]," Mearns says. "I was I was only half there."

When she finally got fitted for her first hearing aids in 2024, this all became clearer. "I was walking down Ninth Avenue back to the theater, and I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and started crying because I could hear the birds, I could hear a flagpole, I could hear the wind," Mearns says. "Hearing the wind was mind-blowing to me, and people's shoes on the sidewalk, the loudness of the trucks." (The latter isn't something she ever thought she'd welcome, especially not living in New York City, but she "didn't care." Mearns says, "I wanted to hear the fullness of all of it.")

Mearns say she cried for most of that day, reflecting on, yes, what she'd been missing out on, but more than that - a new reality. "You don't have to live in that darkness, in that solitude, in that lonely place you've been in for the past 10 years," she remembers thinking. "It doesn't have to exist anymore and these hearing aids made it possible for me to have a better life."

When Mearns took the stage for the first time as the Sugar Plum Fairy with her hearing aids, that message was even more amplified: "I remember during the first section, I went out and I could hear everybody's footfalls. I could hear the jingling of somebody's costume backstage. I could possibly hear a conversation that was going on backstage while I was on stage. Plus, I was able to hear all of the orchestra. I don't even have words still to describe it, because I'm like, 'Wait a minute. I haven't been hearing this for 10 years.'"

Immediately she knew: "This is a new chapter. This is the beginning of something amazing and my world opening up again." And with a second "Nutcracker" season under her belt, Mearns says the mind-body transformation is undeniable. "I feel myself in the studio being even more open, not so closed off, not so self conscious, not not feeling like I have a mask on, not feel like I'm hiding something," she says. "I feel like I have this superpower. I might even feel like sometimes I can hear things that other people can't."